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The Discreet Charm of Robots

By Ian Daly February 23, 2010 8:53 pmFebruary 23, 2010 8:53 pm

Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesThe Snackbot, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, serves food.

“A simple rule of robotic personality seems to be: don’t make things the most efficient way,” said Magnus Wurzer, the man who started Roboexotica, when, for my article on robots who cook and serve food, I asked him how you go about the tricky business of making a machine not just adept — but likeable.

From my days of waiting tables in Manhattan, I knew that nearly every bow-tied emissary schlepping chowder to the masses, at one point or another, messes up. But the great waiters knew how to charm their way out of it — and that’s exactly what these robots have over their assembly line job-stealing predecessors. These robots are self-deprecating. They complain about being tired and wanting to go home. They crack jokes and spar in mock knife fights.

In their own strange way, they’re what would happen if, in restaurant speak, the “front of the house” met “the back of the house.” As one of the robots in my story specializes in slicing vegetables, it got me thinking that, basically, a bread machine is a couple of LED eyes and a bad joke away from being a “robot.”

So when I asked Dr. Heather Knight, a roboticist at NASA’s Jet Prupulsion Laboratory, exactly what it is that separates a robot from a machine — a Roomba from a Rosie — she had one word for me (well, one word and an emoticon: “Character! :-)” she said.

Isn’t that the same thing that separated Julia Child from the geniuses who toiled anonymously in infernal kitchens before her? Does not an entire generation of chefs owe their rock star status, in part, to this very same trait? Do you think it’s time these robots had their proverbial 15 minutes?